A farm girl who took her convictions about healthy food with her when she left the farm was in Durango this week – eight months into a tour of the country to promote her book about the same topic – Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America.
The thrust of Wenonah Hauter’s book is that a handful of large corporations, aided and abetted by political clout, controls food production and processing in the country to the detriment of consumers.
Hauter’s appearance in Durango was sponsored by Maria’s Bookshop and Durango Natural Foods.
In an interview with The Durango Herald, Hauter traced the history of the consolidation of food production and processing into a few hands – a trend, she said, that started with the dismantling of agricultural policies implemented by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to aid farmers and continued through every administration up to today.
“It was not a wild conspiracy,” Hauter said. “But every administration chipped away at the farmer’s ability to make a livable wage.”
The end result was cheap raw produce, cheap labor, huge profits for a few conglomerates and unhealthy food for consumers, Hauter said.
Hauter spent her formative years on her father’s farm in the Bull Run Mountains of Virginia.
“I was an only child, so I chopped kindling, plucked chickens and pinched potato bugs,” she said. “I couldn’t wait to leave the farm.”
But today, she and her husband have 100 acres where they grow vegetables for a Community Supported Agriculture project.
Hauter also is executive director of Food & Water Watch, a consumer rights organization based in Washington, D.C., that watchdogs the government on issues relating to food, water and fishing.
The organization has 17 offices in the United States, including Denver, and an office in Brussels, Belgium.
Earlier, she was senior organizer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, director of the Public Citizens Energy and Environment Program and environmental policy director at Citizen Action.
The United States once was the food basket of the world, but today the nation’s fruits and vegetables arrive from abroad, Hauter said.
By her reckoning, four firms – Wal-Mart, Kroger, Costco and Target – control 50 percent of the grocery industry and in some areas, 70 to 90 percent.
Their products addict consumers to the sugar, salt and fat that do so much to compromise people’s health, Hauter said.
She cited a report published this week that said 18 percent of deaths in the U.S. are linked to obesity.
The headlock that corporate food giants have on consumers is evidenced by the finding that at age 3, children identify brand names, she said. Children now see 5,000 junk-food ads a year.
Hauter said the entire food chain – from field to market checkout stand – needs an overhaul.
“We need a complete systemic change,” Hauter said. “The local-food movement alone is not enough. We need to vote, to hold our politicians accountable,” she said.
daler@durangoherald.com
